Update: I think my heart is breaking. L's grown children were at the pub with him tonight. They have come to say goodbye. "This is my amore," he said of his daughter. And he was animated in the way that people sometimes are when the end is in sight. Tomorrow, Daniele is making a big pizza dinner in honor of him and we will go to be there and to drink a toast to him. 

"You know he is my son," his old father said to us, needlessly, as we sat with him at the table. "Fifty-three years old is very young." 

A said to me, "Don't cry" because she herself was on the edge of tears.